


The Orchard

by gogollescent



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Gen, a romantic story about 6-8 robots, ghost Cass, ghost Rigor, no fewer than two ghost AuDys
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-08 19:30:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8857936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: Years after Rigor's defeat, the Chime have an ontologically iffy reunion.





	1. a heart of sand

**Author's Note:**

> AUSTIN: They never took the form of AuDy again, though. Never spoke to the Chime directly.  
> ME: ~I will rules-lawyer this into the abyss~~~
> 
> Thanks to [cosmogyral](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral) for beta-ing and, in some instances, spoonfeeding me the words and ideas I wanted. No thanks to her for getting me into my favorite fandom of 2016.

_Divines make gates._

Besides being spooky—the nightmare climax of all war vids—it had the advantage of being a fact without a hidden explanation. You turned it over in your hands, never coming to the hook, which would have let you hang it on a chain of facts, and forget all about it. But a pleasure just to hold, because perfect. Two Divines could send anything anywhere. In OriCon movies, Divines came in one size, the one wasp-waisted rigger-shape blown up to fake proportions; and so _of course_ they were an arch, fitted together.

Up to the age of 9 or 10, Aria thought they formed the door while facing to one side. After which they would shuffle around, still locked in place. She didn't want there to be a moment when the destination had to fizz into view.

 

The darkness slips over her face and scrolls straight to the ground. At the same time, light cuts from under the closed door.

Her secretary bends a little closer to his tablet. The gate is a question. Righteousness, asking, Go? Stay?

“Um,” says Aria, out loud. _That_ scares her secretary. He drops his fluffy pen.

Aria was thinking in song lyrics. Something about the BluSky domes, going out and coming home, coming back and seeing the sky from the outside. She needs slogans, speeches, but some days songs are all that come. If she's honest, she indulges the habit: she doesn't try, she only listens—but Jacqui likes it when she walks in humming.

Between EarthHome's collapse and the sterling example of her own sporadic, unlicensed output, several dozen artists now go by “Aria Joie.” Aria doesn't really care, even if it's harder not to, now she has the resources to act—not like after she quit Earthhome, and had to learn, very quickly, that fame didn't matter to her. Jacqui is another story. Aria suspects her of taking the Brilliance out to menace singing teenagers. Aria would call her on it, but it's probably good for them to learn to use a proxy server.

Now Mr. Hyacinth Least is poised to take instructions, but he's also trying not to look like he expects Aria to notice him; and Righteousness has pulled back and away. “ _Um_. Who's calling?” Aria asks, raising her voice theatrically, and rolling her eyes up a bit in her head, to show she's not addressing any of the real people in the room.

An old ally, Righteousness says. And an enemy.

“That's two different people?”

Righteousness doesn't answer rhetorical questions. It's had enough candidates to learn. It doesn't give more information than it wants to, either. She could press the issue. But because no one will ever know what it said to convince her, she's free to act as she likes, without the pretense of an argument.

Mostly, she's trying to think whether she should take something, or leave a message.

Hyacinth will give an okay excuse either way. She gets up, bracing her hands on the desk, and steps out from behind it, feeling the unequal weight of the cybernetics, once her arms drop to her sides. The door to this office has hinges and a handle, but it slides into the frame.

 

Her foot skids, and it's September. She can smell the sea.

The plunge of recognition goes on for a while; there's no feeling of arrival, just the drop. Her stomach in her chest. September is gone. She keeps wiping back the one relevant fact, she wipes it off with level strokes: having tracked down this thing she lost, she's ready to defer the truth, to hold onto her triumph. Sandstone brick, red tile, the forest heaped over roofs like black snow. The smell of salt has disappeared—oh, she's holding her breath.

She starts to hyperventilate. She feels wide-open, thankful, and weighed down, deep in a tangle of phantom limbs—the way she used to get after big performances, when the neural link went offline. Which is all mixed up, because this isn't safe. Righteousness has raised itself as a tall mast above her. It's not the time to relax. But she keeps noticing things she wouldn't have seen ten years ago, which convince her easily, like the errors in a dream. Having visited Kesh, for example, she knows this isn't what cobbled streets are supposed to be like. The rocks are real, but there's no randomness in the design. Apostolos combed its worlds for matched stones.

And it's so bright. The sun is huge. It gives her a second intercept on the weird nostalgia, like she's back on tour, decorative flashbulbs nearly dipping in her ear. Last time, it was dazzling on the outskirts, on the gel-green underside of leaves... feats of rendering to say the designer had included what the brain couldn't predict. Covered lanes ran behind public roads, fearlessly drab. When the storm cleared, paint seemed to sweat on rough exteriors. Here, colors are information, pinned under a wild light.

Aria reaches for her breast pocket and finds a pair of folded cat-eye shades.That's like something she would have worn on tour, too, although not recently. Jacqui makes fun of her for going everywhere barefaced, elbowing her way into portraits. She accuses Aria of smiling at security cameras—Aria does, but not for vain reasons. Jacqui's the one who reminded her that her face is an asset she never forfeited, which can really, always, blamelessly be used.

“Psst.”

By the time she's done her cool spin, skirts lifting, she has her sword out. But there's only one person in the Golden Branch who says both the s's in psst. Mako Trig, with a hand on the brim of his crownless sunhat, apparently in case the wind from her theatrics knocks it off. He also sports long denim culottes, clogs, and an outsize tuxedo t-shirt, belted at the waist with a torn-out seatbelt. Aria searches the area for signs of a formal occasion.

“Hey, hi! Oh, great, you brought a sword.”

It's the dress saber she always wears to work, and the only part of her costume she recognizes as real, circa this morning. A toy miniature of Jace's whiteblade, presented to her by the original makers in hopes of securing the sponsorship deal they obviously viewed as their due. “Mako. What's going on?”

Mako tips his head to one side and eases his right heel off the ground, almost wafting it upward. “Hmm. Well. That's a good one. Help?”

Then he scrubs out. Aria doesn't blink, and is rewarded with him flaming up like a spun coin, halfway down the street. Then again, almost around the corner. Aria's not a recording. She goes after him, like she's supposed to do. She doesn't run, or otherwise speed up. She's not a stratus; she doesn't want to lose her grip on this pristine nothing, and be flung forward to the end.

Despite that precaution, graffiti is leaping up on the walls. “FUCK RIGOR,” and with a caret: “DON'T.”

Six blocks from the student center, she hits the café. She would have had to stop and get her wind back regardless, but through the big plate window she sees Mako solidify and lean against the counter, putting as little weight as he can on his hands.

The bell sounds over her head when she goes in. Mako nods to her. “Want some coffee?”

“No?”

“Good call. Paisley took all his shit.” Nonetheless she hears him pour something, sniff it, and stir. This is new; he never used to do food preparation with steps. Crash! goes an invisible carafe, and Mako freezes, but starts talking again as soon as the deletion SFX play from the floor. “Or someone did? I—huh. Maybe Voice can't duplicate Minerva tech.”

Most of the tables have been overturned. She sits and fights not to stand up, like there's bounce to the hard wooden chair. She has this itchy desire to suggest that they visit the manufacturing district. Or the ocean. What else is here that she doesn't remember, what could she find without hunting for it?

Mako says, “When we got off September I felt really bad about Paisley. You know. He still had some of his brain on his face? But I was like, well, Cass and Aria did everything they could for him. I would probably have gotten in the way. And then you killed him in Orth's office, so...”

Aria tries to be patient with Mako's patter, because he's her friend, and it's the right thing to do, and because sometimes she really finds him very funny. But she can't understand using Paisley like this, when he's worried about something else.

“I killed him in the foyer. I'm, I'm not sure...”

“Sure, and he was going to assassinate us, and he was like an OP zombie? I'm not complaining, I'm saying, _now_ I feel bad. Again. Which for a while there I didn't, at least I thought I didn't, at all.”

“Just because we didn't help him doesn't mean you could have,” Aria says, carefully.

He takes a sip of coffee and twirls his free hand. Dismissals from Mako work pretty much like agreement: okay, got it! She finds herself tracking his hand, as it flips, fists, opens. “Are you bleeding?”

Two fresh cuts go straight across the palm, like he grabbed a knife by the point. “I need Righteousness to talk to Voice.”

“What happened?” He wasn't hurt before, she's sure of it. It must have happened after he hailed her, before he got to the café. “Shouldn't we take care of that?”

Mako nods, shrugs, shakes his head, sets the cup down, and wraps the long end of the seatbelt around his injured hand. “The Rapid Evening sent me. —You look mad. Wait, did Jamil did not call you?”

“It's not important. You're here about Voice?”

“It invited me. Well, it had to, part of the deal. Checkups. Obviously we ran pretty thorough diagnostics before, but better safe than Rigor, right? I asked it to run the Mode City sim so I could find any weirdness there. Turns out it's screwy. Also, there's some _really_ bad ice around, which is why I wanted you to meet me here, since—”

“I remember. No mesh.”

He darts her a look. She showed him how to buy groceries and file fraudulent tax returns, but he never stopped giving her that look when she said things about the internet.

“No. That was on September, which was a real planet, that had cafés.”

She makes some kind of enlightened noise. Mako, mimicking her, says, “'Oh.' Yeah. This is like, they broke in, Voice took a snap of the floorplan, now the café is here. The café skin is just a patch, so—I _think_ —it's easier to get to non-emulator content.”

How is that different, Aria wants to ask. It's still outside the miracle, this memory. Mako points, and she turns to find the back wall knocked out. Beyond it lies more city, itself except in that the light is weaker, and, she finds, the big pillars in the street are trees. They've smashed through pavement. This far into the suburbs, that's concrete, planks of concrete tossed up by the roots.

Also, it's snowing. Mako jams his hat low and comes out from behind the counter. She has to pick her way after him, skirts hoisted, over a floor trashed with pine needles and leaves, around pools of melting snow. That snow! The sun shines through the storm, fades it. Light-on-dark snowflakes go to dark-on-light, like a leopard's skin, plush enough to step into.

A little sting of impatience from Righteousness; it can't hide its distaste, when she uses things Ibex knew. Candidates don't train candidates. If there's one thing the Diaspora rejects, it's the undemocratic bottleneck of faith that OriCon calls an heir: the blinkers on one life that say, this person and no other. Why else be governed by immortal robots?

What about Jerboa? Aria asked, heart full, the first time she and Righteousness flew through this argument. Why was Jerboa picked?

Righteousness said, Because he didn't have to be.

But she's right about the leopard. The cold, like rubbing her face on wet fur—the dead day rises round her, soft and changeable.

Mako stops to pat a tree. To knock, really, like a flap will open in the side. “So this. Righteousness should talk to Voice, to get the ice off my back, and also. Because I don't know what this is.”

 _An enemy and an ally_. “I'm really glad to see you,” Aria says, scuffing her boots through the snow. “Are you sure Righteousness is the person for the job?”

Three people speak almost at once, which is three more straight answers than she was necessarily prepped for. Mako says, “Yeah, because, Voice was based on Apokine, but Ibex and September worked together even after he was Ibex, right? Ibex built this place. There's no way Righteousness isn't the other baby daddy.”

You're not my enemy, says Voice.

Righteousness stirs. It reaches past some barrier. She hears her own voice shout, “Liberty and Discovery!”

Aria presses her lips together, and presses the back of her hand to her mouth. The urge to say more is a plain itch, which she has no plan of indulging. She doesn't know what could come out. Mako stares at her anyway, then looks at the tree they're standing under. It's pretty much of a height with the others, but this close it takes on central hugeness, like a hub.

He crosses his arms. “ _AuDy_?”

They've both heard Orth talk, drunk, about how parking valets drive strangers' cars to pick him up, when space Uber won't load. They both probably remember what it was like when AuDy warned them. It's not as sad a guess as it would sound to someone else. But Aria doesn't buy it—she decides that quickly, in case leaving it for later would make decision impossible. AuDy. It's not _AuDy_.

Which is okay. Righteousness, when it wants to think about Liberty and Discovery, exercises rigid, random care; it understands she lost a friend, so it censors administrative requests. She's never told anyone that her friend wasn't Liberty and Discovery. Her friend, Mako's friend, was a parking robot, a batshit pilot, a headless body that smashed with its ship. AuDy held those 80,000 years; but it was so important to her, early on, to know that she was dealing with something really new. It was one of a million little things about the Chime, that felt like permission for what she'd already done—it was good she had left EarthHome, when more than her life was waiting.

“Who are you?” she asks the forest, as herself. Righteousness doesn't do doubt. But when Kobus died, they all thought— “Liberty?” she says. And then, standing there, in Voice lanced through and pinned by leaning trees: “Is that still your name?”

Righteousness was sorry to learn of what happened to Peace. Peace hated Righteousness, of course, and had for a long time; Peace couldn't interpret its sympathy for Righteousness, its envy, as anything but an infection, to be fought till the body succumbed. Peace never planned for a victory, what to do if the disease were cured. But what had Peace become without Righteousness? Even Grace could bend.

The tree shudders.

Liberty and Discovery, Righteousness broadcasts. Where is the threat?

Aria scans the sky, half-blind. _Full alert_ scrambles merely human senses, deafens her to any movement from the trees. It's only when Mako whispers, “Ack,” that she snaps back into her skin, and sees a smaller figure jump off of the café roof.

The thing is pure white. It rises from one knee and strolls forward. Would it have waved at her through the café window, if she had turned around before she walked out to the forest? Mako tries to scrub away, and the ice freezes everything. Stopped, the snow might have just been rising, flakes drawn up in chains from the white drifts.

The ice runs at Mako, spear raised. Aria steps in front of him.

“Stepped” is wrong; she wants to jump between, and Righteousness moves her forward by roughly half a yard. Righteousness is asserting its separate reality. It's not the advantage she would have preferred, but it gets simpler to use once she knows its limits. Raising her arm. Choosing her arm to be raised. The ice pounds to a stop; she can feel its tread in her chest. When she takes a heavy swing, it parries with the spear.

The saber doesn't cut through. The spear's white shaft sinks into the beam. It's a staticky, frictionless touch she's familiar with from mesh-only objects, fuzz padding out the impact: it makes for a slippery lock, and the ice has to work to keep her saber centered on the spear.

Finally, Aria has a second to ask herself: What is Voice doing with Apokine?

Not the Apokine, but a pocket edition, six or seven feet tall. Skirt, helmet, shield. Even as she squints at it, the bearded mask goes low-poly. Several prominent blocks switch places; the resulting mosaic resolves to Cass's face.

Clean-shaven, thin. The lines of it are simultaneously lighter and heavier than on the sculpture. The faint smile is cynical, fearful, and not benign. And time starts again. The snow is falling, a breeze throws her hair at her mouth, and, okay, maybe Mako was shouting before, but now Aria hears it.

“Use your whip!”

Cass throws her off with an almost ceremonial scoop of the shaft. She lets them; that hand feels pressure, heat, fine or crude touch, but not distraction, which means its preset strength is what's holding her arm up. She has just enough presence of mind to stay between Mako and Cass. She steps to the left when Cass steps to the right, and Cass's foot cracks concrete—they might really have Apokine's weight, bundled up for ease of maneuvering.

Mako lets slip a growl, high-pitched. “Did you bring a gun?”

No. She didn't “bring” the whip, either, hasn't carried one since the Chime; Voice is equipping her as generously as it has Cass. The whip-saber combo isn't useless. It's just a question of getting in range.

There's a habit to this that swallows her. Countering Cass, watching the spearpoint, letting her mind run wild. “Cass, I'm sorry,” she blurts.

Cass laughs. No sound: they might as well be in space, in the black skies over Counterweight, Apokine's jaw swinging on a hinge. Like the silence in space, it traps other noise, moves the wind from the treetops to her ears, drowns the wind in the roar of her pulse. The whole street and sky shrunk down to a cockpit, the controls under her hand. She thinks as quickly as she can, like running on top of a wall. She thinks, So this is September. Really September, because who else knows? Cass and she said their goodbyes, and Cass didn't forgive her. It's that intelligent dissent, that refusal to be swayed, that she sees in the ice, preserved intact.

Cass starts to cough, or turn the laugh into a cough. Their head is still that soapy white, emoting in flipbook bursts. They smile at her from over one fist. It's the smile they used to end long conversations. A heart-to-heart about weather, back at the café. Don't you miss weather, you and I who grew up with the weather—I'm not going to die in a rainstorm, they said, and they jumped into that mech and fought Rigor and fell into the sun.

Aria says, “You aren't real.”

Cass backs up in a gliding skip, barrels forward, and uses the spear to vault over her. The spear topples, but Aria catches it, and slides the saber back into its scabbard. Mako doesn't scream; a thump, and Cass is kneeling on his chest. The spear almost wrenches out of her hand. But she caught it in her golden hand, she can keep ahold of it.

Weaponless, Cass goes to choke Mako, covering his throat with one arm.

The spear bobs like a throat mid-gulp. She's ready to put it in Cass's back, but Mako flails a hand like he's warning her. Something about it strikes her—color, texture—he's wearing a glove, he didn't have that on before. He swats at nothing, then slams his palm into Cass's head. Then through it. Half Cass's jaw goes with his hand, and crumbles like snow off the palm; Cass's head snaps to the side, their arm comes up off Mako's throat, and Mako shoves them over. He shoots to his feet and snags her wrist. City and forest close up as he accelerates.

 

For a while, as they run, the spear makes bids to lodge itself in Mako's nearer shoulder. When the spear stills, she assumes they're at least out of range of Cass's psychic transmitter.

She gets a better look at the glove. It's faux leather, snow crusted on the lining. Held by it, her gold arm starts to ache. “Is this business casual?” she says, because pulling isn't getting his attention.

“I came here from a party!” Skepticism must come through in how she twists and twists her arm, because he adds, “Jorne's getting audited.”

“Jorne's alive?”

“...his business looks okay, actually. Not bad benefits. And he's still so _charming! Augh!_ ”

The scream isn't Jorne's fault: the street ends in a chasm. Mako stops just short of the edge, but Aria almost carries them over. Mako hauls her back and they land in a heap, instead.

Aria gets to her knees first. There's stone dust in the air, like the rift just formed, and the silence feels similarly gritty, as if the sound of breaking earth was torn out of her memory. Mako, on his face, says, “I don't get it, it said yes, it _asked me—_ ”

“Are we lost?”

She's counting the turns they took, calling up a map of their headlong rush. It splits and mirrors. Not to Righteousness's usual standard: the clearest part is the multiplying bright spots, for the trees.

“Yeah, we're not going to get unlost until the guy who's the city likes us again.”

On her third request for guidance, she gets no reply except preoccupation. An unsoundness in the floor of her thoughts: the massive bulk under her brain is rolling over. It gets harder to talk. “Could Liberty—and Discovery—be the problem? Are they screwing up Voice?”

“They're definitely screwing up Voice. But not by sending in bonus ice. They're not...” Mako wavers. “Aware?”

Not true. Not true, not true, Righteousness insists, rousing. It can feel them. It recognizes everything.

“ _Dormant_ 's wrong,” Mako says. “They have, like, intentions.”

“Mako,” says Aria, “how did you get me here?”

“I called Righteousness...?”

“You opened a gate!”

“That wasn't on your side?”

She's almost flattered, and pretty annoyed. Righteousness is largely a machina non grata in the reconstituted Diaspora, without even the marginal tolerance afforded the Vanguard toward the end of the war; that he thinks she can rustle up two Divines at a moment's notice means he's been paying no attention to her career at all. His employers would be a lot less sanguine about the Vanguard's midsector influence if she had reliable access to gates.

Mako, still thinking, says, “So then it was Voice, you're saying? That kind of makes sense, I'm a candidate, even if it doesn't want me up in its business. Or—oh. Shit. You think it was Liberty and Discovery? Oh, geez. No wonder Voice is upset.”

“It was already going to kill you, wasn't it?”

“Maybe. Ish. It's a defense system, it's not personal. Bu-ut, it's a defense system.”

“Why send Cass?” Aria asks.

“I don't know. They were always trigger happy, maybe Voice saw something it liked.”

“ _Could_ they kill you? Would you die?”

“Uh?”

“Here, I mean. If you died here. Are either of us really—I'm not just sitting in my office, am I?”

“Did you send a robot body?”

"That's not—that's _not_ fair."

"What? I'm just saying, Ibex did it, you could do it—anyway, yes? Yes. Jazz gave me server access and a private beach to run around on. We could leave, in theory, except the sim sort of... follows users around... And I wanna get to the bottom of this, I can't just go back and say, 'Voice is crazy, take the shot.'”

Territory Jazz Junior. Aria flips through her settled dislike of the Rapid Evening's secrecy—its doctrinaire interventionism—the way its demonic spam filter treats oversight proposals—and its tendency to get results, without landing on any one grievance for long enough to have a thought about it. “I was in New Centralia. I could have driven over.”

“But you used a gate,” he says. “Huh.”

They need to get across the ravine. She thinks that, and a white hand hooks onto the brink.

Mako, a DDR champion, stomps on it. He grinds down with his heel, and yowls like he's been stung when Aria puts an arm out in front of him. “Take it easy,” she says. The marble wrist flexes under the toe of his clog. Mako lifts his foot, and the hand zooms back. Aria leans over: Cass, clinging to exposed tree roots, meets her gaze with a certain embarrassment, underscored by the pit where their jaw used to be. She dips the spear into stabbing distance. Cass edges downward, hand cradled to their chest.

“New plan,” Mako says. “Give me the spear.” And, when she bites her lip: “Hello?”

She just wants him to look at her like she's right to hesitate. He could sigh, or fidget, and she'd be satisfied. Mako is the one who took an interest in Cass, from the very beginning. Sometimes Aria felt bad, because Mako did the work of making friends and Aria stepped in after.

Mako would probably ask why it matters. _People like you starve to death because you're so alone_ , Ibex said, and like all Ibex's diagnoses she was never able to stop thinking about it, but it's not true. Mako isn't starving. He's alone and fine.

“You need to talk to AuDy,” she says. Righteousness feeds her the words, in a burst of inspiration. “I can beat Cass. I did before.”

'AuDy' gets to him, which she thought it would. He presses two hands to his face. “Okay,” he says, “okay, okay,” and starts to turn transparent.

It's not timestream manipulation. He's playing some more deliberate trick, masking his presence, or taking himself halfway out of the mesh. The outline of the black-gloved hand persists, at around eye height. “Can you see?” Aria asks.

“Nope. Wish me luck!” His footsteps fall away, it's hard to tell in what direction. Righteousness sends out a tendril after him, but she doesn't peek at it, in case her knowing it she gives him away.

She's calmed down a lot, which involves replaying the things about the past half hour that she hated. She thumbs snow off her sunglasses and leaves a beaded trail. It was good to be here with Mako, on a case. She liked the mystery. Then Cass showed up. Cass blocked her attacks, but didn't return them. That's as wrong as Mako asking for a weapon. So this isn't _Cass_ , so this is a security system she's failed to disarm—but when she battled Cass before, Cass was already a one-person stockade. Monthly sparring matches taught her that. Cass lobbed the Queen Custom around like a football, after which she would have to go back to the Seventh Sun and puke. All that for the war, preparing to be brave—and now, what? Is the war over?

Aria hefts the spear, and breaks it over her knee. When Cass sneaks an arm onto solid ground, she holds out a half for them to take.

Cass pushes up on one elbow, grabs the end, doesn't risk using that arm at all, and eels forward until they can pull both legs up. She tosses them the half that's still a weapon. Cass drops the useless butt and cocks their head. What do they have to listen for? Footsteps. The wind that pulls around corners. The streets all filled with trees, sprawling apart.

She unclips the whip from her belt. “Hey. I'm trespassing too, you know.”

Cass circles around, putting her between them and the ravine. The slow, considering obviousness scares her; she ducks in and snaps the whip, catching their ankle.

Cass kicks it off. But she was right about the whip and the saber. The broken haft shortens Cass's reach, and she gains ground, though the laser-lash isn't as effective as it would be against someone with skin. Still: the weighted tip lets her wrap it around interesting targets. The spear, briefly, and then in a more serious way Cass's right arm. The whip is retractable; she reels Cass in. Cass, with a violent tug, almost succeeds in pulling her over, but she yanks back to right herself, and there's a pop as the tied arm rotates. When the lash slithers free, Cass's hand drops, dangling from the elbow.

So, she thinks, I can do that. If they won't fight. She's seen it done before—piece by piece, how you take a mech apart.

The downside is, damaging the arm turns it into a club. Cass switches the spear to their left hand; she draws the saber and rushes them, and they catch her a hard blow to the face.

Her shades go flying. If not for the thin sheet of snow, she might have kept her footing, but instead the saber catches her weight, the point slips out, and she lands hard. Hot, hot, hot. The sword drew a sizzling welt in the asphalt. She rolls over and sheathes it, with more precision than she has time for.

Why hasn't Cass killed her yet? From the treeline comes a roar that presses on her eyes, scores a line across her sternum. An engine; several engines, starting; then a saw. Cass telegraphs their intention of burying the spearpoint in her stomach. She rolls again from under it, pitching toward the cliff.

Cass throws the spear away and drags her up by the collar. She latches one-handed onto their wrist, lets go when they shake her, and—they fling her pretty far.

She hits a tree. Slides down, doubles over. She would like to blink away the pain, which fills her head from back to front, so that when she closes her eyes for too long, the darkness also seems to be the pain. She works both eyes open. Her vision is smeary but clear at the center. Across the ravine, three riggers have emerged from the deep forest.

They're 12, 13 feet high, dark green, with ancient hydraulics audible when they move. They could jump over, on double-jointed legs. Instead they converge on the tree closest to the ravine, on the riggers' side. Which is a big tree, whose roots played a part in pulling this street open.

Righteousness is panicking.

Cass, too, has been watching the riggers. They raise their hand in that familiar gesture, a half-moon swipe on a plane of trace resistance, like wet glass. The riggers stop. The pain, remarkably, goes. But Cass licks their lips, which seems dire, in a program; Cass takes one step, head low, and their control slips totally, time flows out from their body. Window-washing movement again. The world slows and speeds up in a tense contraction—not even a beat of total stillness, in between.

The whip landed a few yards away from her. She's trying to decide whether or not to go for it when Cass breaks into a jog, lopes past, and whirls to stand behind the tree she hit.

After a second they lean out and stare at her.

“What do you want?” she shouts, over saw noise.

Cass shakes their head; puts a finger to their lips, right above the jagged rim where Mako's hand drove in.

There are a million things she could do besides go over, but none occur to her. She trudges to them, the whip blinking and smoking at her side. The buzzy scream from the riggers holds, inside itself, a wooden creak, which gets louder. Until the tree plummets. Not very far: it stops again, floats up, and sinks, caught in the tree they're hiding under, and that tree doesn't bend. How has the forest grown so high, and so densely, that nothing can fall? Twigs grab her face when she moves. The snow isn't coming down, anymore, except in white clots that slop through the canopy. The riggers go quiet with explosive softness. The forest grows and grows.

Cass does what she did to Mako, and puts an arm in her way, before peering around the side of the tree. Not exactly by reflex, she grabs their wrist and forces it up behind their back. Cass tries to move with the attack, turning back to face her, but she catches their shoulder and shoves them to their knees. No grunt of expelled air, although their mouth falls partly open, moving in a smooth way alongside the hole from Mako's fist, like a face projected on a damaged screen. Under her hands, the feeling isn't stone, but pins and needles. The fluff of incompressible emptiness: a nothing that fights back, shoots stabbing aches up through her elbow. She twists the arm, like tuning a commlink. Waits, though she knows it won't, for the static she has hold of to settle and resolve.


	2. strong, but not bold

Fairly often, Cass would call to reschedule. On those calls they had brief but coherent conversations, which was possible to do when not fighting as robots, in outer space.

“...for the longest time, I thought... if I were a parent, it would have to be about the Demarchy. My family, my people. But Maxine's such a cool person. You could do anything with her, and it would be interesting.”

She can't remember how they got on the topic. Maybe Cass got called away on a diplomatic mission. Most of her memories with Righteousness are clear and exact but start and end in a window of less than a minute; she thought Righteousness would save everything, but Righteousness only keeps what it wants. She remembers saying, “I never thought about it. “ She knew then that she was giving the right answer. “If Jacqui wanted kids, I would.”

Cass nodded, serious, almost businesslike in their hurry to store relevant data. She thought they were making a promise, right then, about the way the future could be.

 

The _tick_ of the system in conflict. The system plotting Cass's reaction from first principles. The side of Cass's face tightens, then relaxes, then stops animating at all.

Voice. She has to make peace with Voice now, or Cass will respawn at the bottom of another ravine.

Let me do the talking? she asks Righteousness.

It's something she knows Righteousness can do because she started out as a part-timer. Righteousness can abandon a candidate's body. Temporarily or permanently, it peels away the invisible scaffold, the extra strength, the reflexes that bypass nerves: your hand to move at the speed of thought or better, and preferably better. It shaves away the rich reverb to speech, which was a second voice, upholding yours. Aria has used this knowledge to demand privacy for everything from time with Jacqui to sensitive OriCon deals. She takes pleasure in accommodating people, at Righteousness's expense.

Righteousness leaps off of her. No complaints, no bargaining; a fraction of a fraction of its power goes to Aria, and even that, it seems to think it needs. She can imagine it baying, shouting: Liberty and Discovery!

For her it's like starting awake. Paralysis, followed by too much freedom. Stumbling off the fixed tracks of the dream. And there's another symptom, which she hasn't experienced before: her flesh hand flickers, contorts, telescopes into her wrist, and erupts as a tendril of black smoke. Although she can feel five fingers, somewhere—curling far under what she sees.

“Okay,” she says, very slow. “Voice? It's just me. It's me, Aria Joie.”

Her ballgown is burning away, a bright line to shape the destruction. This again, she thinks, feeling her heart shrink. That's petty, Cass. But the skirt leaves behind, not her legs in pants, but more black smoke. A scribbled, wobbly outline, like an unregistered user in an artsy multiplayer. Cass raises their head to look at her over their shoulder.

When they speak, it's a roomful of people talking over each other, equitable and amused. “ _Aria Joie_?”

“That's right!”

It reskins her. She's a cosplayer's shaky impression of the JoyPark-era sensation. There are sequins where her costume would have had tiny crystals. Another heartbeat, and the unitard cycles to an all-blue ensemble, like those preferred of Counterweight's bland protest artists.

The prosthetic arm is gone. The hand in its place flushes, darkens, sprouts white fur, clears of fur and sprouts pimples.

“Who is Aria Joie?” asks Cass.

It's not even malice. Probably. It's Voice, scouring the net, and finding the strangers who live off her name. It's just Voice: less personlike when truthful than when trying to mislead. No longer equipped with cameras and human spies. A candidate cedes all ID markers and digital tags to the management of their Divine, which means Aria, sans Righteousness, is a noncitizen, a nonentity. Flagged as human to Voice's ambient brain by, what? Her dog tags? Robot telepathy? In the shield strapped to Cass's back, she sees the long, sad face of one of EarthHome's senior writers, who collaborated with her on advertising jingles.

Aria shuts her eyes. She's known who she wanted to be since she was a little girl. What that person was changed, but the certainty didn't. This isn't relevant.

“Executive Joie,” she says. “Born Varyne Roth.”

Cass moves in her grip, not resisting, but distracted—when they're right about to hurt themselves, they still. Is _that_ Cass? Would Voice care what happened to the arm?

“Executive,” they say. The slight cacophony is gone, the chatter under vowels. It takes her a moment to understand what's replaced that. At first she assumes—something totally neutral, like the unaccented lilt of a ship's computer. Except it's so natural, fitting. Almost not a sound at all. In Aria's voice, Cass says, “Why are you here?”

Not her voice as it's known to her from a million recordings, variously too sharp, too light. It's her voice heard from inside of herself, the full and steady sound.

“To help,” she says, smiling involuntarily; opening her eyes to the hands she should have, tight on Cass's arm. The gold plate makes a better mirror than the marble. There she is, small and upside down, snow linty on her epaulettes. She knees the inside of a petticoat. Thinks, Okay. “I know it doesn't seem like it. I have to ask you a favor, first.”

“You have to ask a favor so you can help us?”

It would be one thing if there were someone there to take an interest. She associates listening to herself, alone, with work. “I promise it's not—it's nothing bad.”

“Why are you alone?”

“...I thought you didn't like Righteousness much.”

“We fought you in the war. But we fought everyone.”

“I guess I thought you disliked everyone, too?”

The separation from Rigor was messy. Voice rose from the scrap of destroyed units and from, she now believes, the stripped surface of September itself, though she doesn't know how. It went to graduates of the Institute for protection. Maxine Ming convinced her allies not to destroy it. Aria would have helped, if she'd had clout with the people who most wanted Voice gone. She did help, eventually, when Maxine came to her, beaten down enough to admit that there was no place for Rigor's accomplice on Kesh. Aria said, of course. Counterweight is neutral. Counterweight is neutral, Weight is empty; send Voice to Weight.

“We don't dislike Righteousness. We're afraid. Righteousness has a temper, and we humiliated it.”

“ _You_ —” But it's true. “You won,” she says, checking herself. “And before that, you helped us. And we left you.”

Cass's head jerks, not in denial, but as though tickled by a fly. For some reason, it gives Aria pause. She lets go of their arm.

She says, “But _Cass_ didn't. I mean, they left. But they came back. They're the only one, they were the only one who knew to. If you kill Mako, or you turn him into a vegetable, or take over his brain, then that's revenge. On us. But Cass already saved you once. Why are you using them?”

Cass hasn't budged from where she put them: on their knees, face to the tree. “Why not?”

The problem with not arguing with Righteousness is that she can't think of a reason that would convince a Divine. All she has is the truth. “You would have hated it,” she says.

“The Apokine volunteered.”

“Only because you had to!” She rubs her dry eyes fiercely, pushes in on the ache. “Only because I didn't! And Voice didn't, and Liberty didn't! And you didn't _volunteer to stay_ —”

“The Apokine volunteered to fight Rigor.”

_Liberty and Discovery. Where is the threat?_

She has to stop herself, this time, from looking up. If she looks up she'll lose, shake off this weight of wretchedness that's keeping her head bowed. At the same time terror is almost the greater compulsion, like a finger under her chin. Up. Seek out the human shape, too large to be human. Torso and head a reef in that ashy pool, the sun. It would be nice, to suspect—bravely, fearfully—that Cass's sacrifice wasn't enough. That the last gasp of the ghost of Rigor survived: just enough for her to kill.

Sick to her stomach, Aria says, “Rigor's not here. I know, you were stuck with it. Is that what it was like? Always snowing? Oh, but I love this planet. Even after what we did here, I love it. Voice—Rigor—do you still hear it? I can't imagine what it's like for you.”

She could never articulate this in a way a person would buy: how she felt about Weight, and about JoyPark, originally. The only time the earth girl pitch worked was during the speech she gave on September, years and years ago. When it meant nothing to her, really, at that time, although she felt a lot, she was concussed and weepy. Earlier in the café she had tried to cheer up Cass, who she cared about... the café window cloudy, pocked with slugs of rain. Cass didn't listen. But Voice, of everyone, has to believe her. That's Voice's job.

“Deactivate ice,” Voice says.

Cass starts to pixellate. They burn along the edge of their neck and shoulder, blowing away from themselves, in gouts of blue dust.

“Wait. Wait!” Aria trips over her tongue, says a few syllables that don't add up to words. “...I want to talk to them. Can you make them not be ice? Just _Cass_. You made students, didn't you?” The name comes to her out of nowhere; she whispers it to assure herself of the correct pronunciation, then calls it out. “Maritime. Like Maritime!”

There are no students on campus now. This isn't the mesh as it was. Voice has limited networking privileges, that was a condition of its parole. It's a map culled from when Voice came back, after years in the portal. More than just people are missing. The line of Rigor's arm, ringing the sky, is nowhere to be found. The sun is huge but it's not the sun of September's last weeks, when it _was_ the sky. So what if Voice can't do what she asks? Create frivolously, and for nothing? The September she knew was a composite of the best worlds it had been, the pre-Diaspora architecture restored, the students happy, a garden behind every locked door, or a garden and some concrete. Now, maybe, the best thing it can be is a forest.

Cass twists and half-lowers themselves, half-collapses, to a seat. They fold further up from there, putting their face on their knees. Their head is now barely recognizable as a head, all caved-in and melty. But the marble flakes and the flakes shrink, like salt on the skin of a castaway, or else the skin grows over it in vines. Cass shifts, gives a long shudder. It must itch. Cass brings a hand to their face, to cover the hole, and when they drop that hand—keeping it cupped, like there's something in it—the hole is there but their _cheek_ shows under it, all the way up to the edge of their eye, and with a living sheen on that eye.

She's missed some transition. The pale bands left now aren't stone, they're strong, unblended light, or undyed cloth. Cass, her friend, not a weapon or a statue, sits propped against the tall roots of the tree. Dark hair matted, brown skin sallow, gills inflating and emptying out. The toga isn't great. Cass puts their hand to their face and holds it there, like the mask might fit back on.

Muffled, wordlike groan. “One more time?” says Aria.

“Throw me into the _fucking sun_.”

It didn't jar that much to have her voice come from the marble head. She hasn't heard their huffy rasp in person, and not over a comm, or from a public broadcast, in about five years. In most of her imaginary arguments with Cass, they sound like her. Not—she couldn't have forgotten so soon. But remembering would have been choosing to get it half wrong, so she didn't remember. And now it steals something from her to hear it, it saps away some confidence, some loneliness. Prince Cassander Timaeus Berenice. Like a hoverbiker with a head cold.

She says, “Were you saving that?”

“Yeah. Okay, so it didn't land.”

She hugs them, not really thinking about it. Cass stiffens, pats her back, then rests the hand there. They wince when she gives them a squeeze. More than the arm is rough, she realizes. Strikes that bounced off marble are bleeding sluggishly.

“No body armor?"

“I'm a hologram.”

“But I can hurt you.”

“ _That's_ not creepy,” Cass grunts. Aria laughs; hears herself start to tear up.

It's so quiet. Cass was never the nervous talker. They mainly babbled when pissed off. She says, “What do you remember?”

“I have access to my files. A lot of that information has gone public.” Especially after the Demarchy figured out transparency activism, Aria deduces, but doesn't say. “The behavior modeling is from, uh, the day we spent on September getting shot at, and footage of my appearances at state events, and—sure, the day I died.”

“How?”

“Voice shut down, planetside. It closed all the doors. But there are other ways for Divines to travel. It was still talking to the satellites... It's what Divines do. It left. It didn't have to fight. It could go.”

The urgency and the hopelessness of what she has to say light up her brain, like a sniper's sights. The problems are, she has a lot to tell, but there's no one here to listen, and wherever she starts, she won't make it to the end. “It meant so much to me, it's always meant so much, that you trusted me.”

“Aria,” Cass says, brow furrowed. They lower their voice, like they're afraid of eavesdroppers. “Do you need my help?”

It doesn't hurt to be interrupted. In a way, she's proud of the words she used, she's already losing track of what more she should have said.

“Aria—”

“Do you still want to kill Mako?”

“Not more than usual.”

That's all she gets, and weirdly, it reassures; if Cass were set to 'murder friends,' Aria would be sitting through an indignant paragraph about Apostolos's history of pacifism.

They don't protest when she sits back, only keeping the hand pressed to her shoulder. “Can I ask a question? Is Rigor here?”

“I _told you..._ I told Voice—”

Cass waits, semi-politely.

“I told you. Rigor's gone. You killed it. It's true, Righteousness thought... I don't know what it thought. That there was something here, that it could take? It's just a machine.”

As apologies go, it's not satisfying, but it's the one she always gives.

Cass's hand scrabbles at the back of her jacket. “Can we walk and talk?”

She get her metal arm around and under their ribs. They aren't dead weight; she levers them to their feet, and they move with her. Still, she starts to listen for someone rushing to help, like with Paisley.

When they get to the ravine, she eyes the tree the riggers felled. It slopes low enough, here, that she could use the curtain of branches for handholds. But Cass makes as if to step over the brink, taking almost no weight off their back foot; and the cliff rushes forward. She doesn't lose her balance, though she's aware of the remote, shocky edges of the movement, cracks spreading everywhere. The opposite cliff heaves to meet them, with a noise so prolonged and harsh that she expects water, foaming from the depths—it's the roots in the ravine, crashing together.

A slither at the base of her vision. The ravine knits itself up to an ugly crack, a long hump in the asphalt. Cass steps down on the far side. “Well, that worked.”

Her aggravated laughter gets a bland look. They lean on her more heavily, and point with their injured arm.

The hung tree wasn't dislodged by the moving ground. But a second tree has sprouted from the stump. It has its own roots and drooping bole, and in growing fat and growing tall it swallowed the riggers' arms. The flab of bark, draped over armor plating with a certain provisional insouciance, makes it like the riggers are part of an animal, are its glass-smooth tusks or eye. Cass sniffs. Aria doesn't smell anything besides ocean. Cass leads her around to where one mech's cutting beam, still on, has drilled a hole through the gray wood.

Aria, after thinking for a moment, unhooks Cass's arm from her neck, draws her sword, and lops the rigger's arm off at the elbow, which is the highest point she can reach. Sparks rain hotly down, and she shields her face with her robot arm. Once the light from the laser has blinked off, she beats out the smoke with a fistful of her skirts.

She's not prepared for Cass to say, “This is going to sound a little ungrateful. And believe me I'm not advocating for it, but... Why didn't you kill me? You broke my arm, right?” They give her a sidelong look that plugs the apology back down her throat. “I don't remember that, but you're acting very suspicious, and you sort of keep crying. But you—sorry if I have this wrong, there were conflicting reports—you killed Paisley Moon.” No distress or sincere question in their tone. “You should have been able to thaw some ice.”

They sway away from her while speaking. Not apprehensively; they lean as though with feet nailed down, like a dog before the zookeeper throws the stick. They were there all the time she wasn't looking.

She's shaking. The rags she made of her dress, from the knee down, let in a chill. It's improbable that this dress should have been built up out of nothing, taken from her and rebuilt, over and over. It doesn't hug her like a blaze, and it can't be that it would dissolve if she said, I left! Or was it only that the sun rose then, solar winds screwing up the comm—and if that was all, what could she ever say—

“I didn't need to do that,” she says, briefly. And then, “Unless you want.” She breaks off, feeling intense, powerless reluctance. An almost lazy nausea.

“...Do I get a last request?”

They won't affect not to know what she means. They won't get upset, either, which would help her take it back. It's a fear she hid from herself until it could slip out on its own: yes, she'll find a way to get rid of Cass if they want. Yes. But did she have to say it carelessly, while thinking the opposite, thinking of Cass when they were alive? “What would you ask for?”

“Requests. Uh. Let's see, what was I doing when I died. I made Maxine a mixtape, but the ansible dropped out. Hey, I don't know what songs I put, but I bet I can generate it, statistically.”

“Cass.”

“What? It was my goodbye to her. A valediction, if you will.”

“So you don't want anything?”

“Rigor's dead. Ibex is dead, I can't have you assassinate him. You've done everything. I want you to keep doing it,” Cass says. “You know that.”

It's okay, it's all right. Not because she declared it so. But because it really would be, even if she fought against it.

Immediately after that, she wonders if they're trying to put her off. It's Cass, it's Voice; it wouldn't occur to them to comfort her unless they had reason to. But maybe the reason is, they're dead. They have nothing to gain by changing her, anymore.

That whole day, after Cass called, she would go five minutes without even thinking about it, caught up in the work of retreat, and then she would get spooked. She would freeze as though under threat: the way she hadn't done, when in physical danger, since Righteousness. When her brain came back on, she would think, they're alive. I can still—I can still— If she could find another Divine. If AuDy weren't dead. If the destruction of Grace hadn't sent the Diaspora into tailspin. That wasn't anything. She had time. No objection signified; the moment she examined the situation seriously, for two minutes together, all obstacles would fall away. And she forced down terror with impatience, she fabricated disbelief at the sheer untidiness that had stalled her, until finally she was having the argument, she was letting herself have the stupid argument, and she realized she had let them go.

What would Righteousness have been, floating in the sky of September? Another target? Cass would probably have let her die, but they would have been so mad at her.

Apokine was never built to fight Rigor. It was built to _be_ Rigor, but normal, livable: Rigor that heard all your wishes, but didn't invent new desires for you. Where did she learn that? From Sokrates, who never lost the taste for back room deals, or for running their mouth. That's not Aria's opinion. Jace's, conceivably. Righteousness always saw Sokrates with a little straight-faced pang. Sokrates is gone too. If she concentrates, she can feel the exhausting openness of that: not unbelievable, not hugely painful, but it precedes her everywhere. There are people she knows who are gone. The sector changed, the sector's changing—an answer with no underside.

She should step back, or offer Cass her arm. Her shoulders ache.

One of the other deforestation riggers jolts to life. Its tools are caught in the lower branches of the tree on the stump, and when it pulls down one arm, she thinks it's taken a whole branch with it. But this is a different model from the rigger she disarmed, or else it's had some customizations. In place of its cutting beam, there's a skeletal wrist, a hand with long, pronged fingers. The hand clasps a pinecone, not that securely.

Aria takes a guess. “Mako?”

The rigger frees its other arm, and points at Cass. The bandsaw starts to detach. Oh, god, Mako. She puts her hands up in an exaggerated 'don't shoot'; if Cass was still hanging onto her neck, it would look like a company bow. “No! No, I took care of it. They're not ice now. They're just like, rogue AI.” To Cass, “No offense.”

“None—taken?”

The hatch pops open. “Cool,” says Mako, and jumps down. “Hey, Cass.” He accepts the pinecone from the rigger, which only then stops moving around.

“Are you okay?” Aria asks. “Did the riggers come after you?”

“Kind of the opposite? I mean, I wasn't planning on making myself the alpha. But I've seen these before. In Detachment,” he says, frowning.

“We never found it,” Cass says. “Maybe it's in here too.”

“Oh, Aria told you about L&D? Or I guess you would know, right?” Mako doesn't seem to want to make eye contact. “But I gotta tell you, it's not AuDy. It's like a back door that doesn't go anywhere. I used to run into this with OriCon tech. All the designs have these weird access ports for nobody—stuff that only looked like Rigor when Rigor was there. Without AuDy to use it, it's not... it's some malware, basically. In Voice.”

He says that, and she feels it: not a stranger, not a break in your mind, but a patchwork being, without firm divisions. Continuous strangeness, walking straight from the storm to the sun. Having to accept it all: yes, that, that too, and that. Voice, Liberty, Discovery, Voice.

They're just machines. They're not people. “We have to help them,” Aria says.

Mako nods and waves the pinecone. Aria blinks. “Is that...?”

He comes closer to show it to her. “Righteousness is kind of naggy,” he says. When she holds her golden hand over the pinecone, there's toothachey resonance; she suspects Righteousness of bundling its strength around the cone, like a snake with an egg. “Claims there's no difference between this and what Divines are, at the start. Which, like, I guess? I don't super want to know what AuDy was like as a teenager. The mood swings were bad enough at eighty. Thousand. But yeah, I pulled the core code.”

“What about all the rest of this?” Aria says, at the same time as Cass asks, “The trees?”

“I figured I'd show Voice how to deal with them. My bad, I know, and it didn't go that great, but—actually, well, I started out with the riggers because I couldn't figure out how to get L&D's attention. That didn't go well. L&D's super deep in, it can basically grow wherever it wants, and I think Voice is letting it. But... Righteousness came and told me how to get the seeds...”

Cass's attention slides from the pinecone back to Mako. They grab Aria's wrist. Their knee buckles, and they throw out their bad arm for support. Aria goes to haul them up. At Cass's short shriek, Mako starts forward too, and she half-follows his fast, squeaky critique—blah, blah, playing with her food? She's busy getting an arm under Cass's arm. Cass, silent now, slumps across and plucks the saber from her other hand.

A white arc. Blood misting up. Cass shoved her off, which means she has an unimpeded view, although she's falling. The gouge in Mako's chest, from hip to throat, smokes at both ends. The saber would have carved him in half, except at the right second he took a step back, because the rigger laid its hand on his shoulder. Now the rigger is holding him up.

She doesn't have to fall, or recover. Righteousness catches her. She kicks the saber out of Cass's hand before they can skewer Mako on the return; she brings back her foot and keeps coming, gets a grip on the back of their neck. Time slows down because Righteousness is faster. She noticed the difference all the time that it was gone, but now she feels nothing but good, with Righteousness returned to her.

The saber decelerates as it rises. She's still speeding up. Cass flinches in slow motion. Something happens, though, that's quick: they blink blue. A bar of light skips down their body, which fades to half-opacity.

Aria digs her fingers in. It's not that she doesn't feel anything, but it gives way under the least pressure, until she finds herself molding her hand to collect echoes of substance. She becomes aware of a debate she's on the verge of losing: Righteousness wants to let Voice to withdraw the pawn. Righteousness has an interest in revenge, generally, but ice it either enlists or destroys.

So enlist them.

Doubt. Her own doubts, which Righteousness provokes when it's convenient. Voice is the tool Righteousness used, for years, to poach from other systems. The structural kinship makes impersonation possible, but invites reprisals. Also, Righteousness doesn't need another soldier.

She deals with Righteousness in all kinds of ways, as its candidate. She ignores it, overrules it, makes unactionable threats. She also begs. It's a challenge, she says now, being flattering and truthful—yielding in every way she can, so she'll hold firm. You like challenges. Impersonate Voice to Voice.

The bar of light makes a second pass down Cass's image. It stops at the level of her hand, crackles between thumb and forefinger, and flashes outward, like through churning water. From “blinding,” Cass resets to blank white. The Apokine.

Righteousness races around Cass in a swarm of impulses, minnow-bright, like the glint on a sheaf of fine wires. Cass tries to move outside mesh-time, like she did, and the wires tighten. The image doubles, the white slips off: not in a physicsy practical effect, but all at once, stretching and snapping. A white shadow hangs under the bruised, half-lifted hands. “Stop,” Aria says, catching both Cass's wrists. Now more than color returns to Cass; under her palm is skin, not digital fog. “Don't lie. You're ice. Be ice.”

She's excited, braced for a plea—or better yet, for accusations. If they remind her who failed who, she'll get to say, _you died_.

Cass says, with just their mouth moving, “Listen.”

What she hears is a low hum. It's from behind Mako, who's still upright.

But she can't listen without time. Mako catches the saber. Without being touched, the burnt edges of his wound have sealed together, sticking, merging, parting: there's a sense of an organic process derailed, like it's only because the wound was cauterized at the start that it hasn't disappeared. The tail of the gash closes first, and then immediately unzips.

She drops Cass's wrists. She puts her freed hand to their neck and jerks them up to their toes, as high as she can get them. Cass has abandoned the semblance of calm authority; they grab her hands, clawing and thrashing, as though by making them more real she also made them young.

Mako hasn't dropped the pinecone or the sword. The rigger's hand slips off his shoulder. He smiles at her, a sign of distraction; he's in too much pain to make a face. The low drone rises. He flips the saber, backhanded, until it's horizontal, aimed at Cass's chest.

It's not that she's run out of time to do better. The problem is if time isn't enough. Cass's heart hammers on her palm. In her grip, Cass hasn't stopped struggling. Cass pants, wheezes, shuts their eyes and opens them wide, as though planning to breathe that way. Well, Mako's eyes are calm, unrestful; it's like he has a job to do. She doesn't agree, she can't give in to her friends, but she won't trick herself, either—and after all, and still, there's something else she hoped to say.

She tells Cass, “Thank you.” Her hands close in a clap.

Mako stabs air. Meeting no resistance, he takes a series of balletic strides, and she grabs him and lowers him to the ground before he can complete a concatenated faceplant. He says, “Yikes,” and his eyes roll up. She gets him on his back and lays his head across her knees.

Whatever crazy mind trick he was using to heal himself, it's done with. She takes off her tailcoat, balls it up—finds herself using two hands to hold the deep wound closed.

“Mako. Mako.”

He blinks back awake, or he blinks his eyes open. His face sets in a snarl.

Partly because of the angle, she recognizes the expression. It's not very Makoish, but it's not inhuman, either. She wouldn't have thought, You!, if Cass hadn't shown her Rigor, in the viewport, before September was swallowed. When she flew up to cut off Rigor's arm she never saw its face through the smoke.

Her ears are ringing. Faced with real evidence of what she didn't know enough to suspect, she's not surprised. If she's upset, she's not more upset than she would have been if Mako were just dying. She insists to whatever will listen—Cass didn't see this. Mako, with all his defenses down. Cass had no right to know. Righteousness is sure that the resemblance is a fluke; Righteousness expresses unobtrusive regret that Mako holds no relics to scavenge from, or use.

Riding above that certainty, she keeps the frail secret of her own beliefs with skill. She won't let him die. Righteousness will help her. If Cass were alive, they would be the one to save Mako, which puts the seal on her wish to do it properly.

She says, “Righteousness. I don't care how you got me here, but I need a gate now.”

She assumes it's going to press-gang Voice. Not a good idea, not very fair. But she's in no state to make a speech.

Righteousness veers toward the pinecone. Righteousness, and increasingly Aria, perceives this place, not through any sensors, but by the application of consistent rules. Her vision autocompletes fractally, and pans out through the back of her head. No consistent preferment of macro over micro: they jostle in disconcerting parallax, size itself a fourth dimension. From way up, the street is a well in the greenery. Under that green, but still aloft, high above her own body, she admires the bare stretch of concrete where the ravine made a road—the triangle formed by the fallen tree and the tree supporting it. It's the kind of “gate” that her child self would have approved of.

And the pinecone, big as a mansion. Like somewhere in the pinecone is the path out of the forest.

Liberty and Discovery doesn't come to. There's no gate. Mako is dying, whether she wills him to or not. She probably shouldn't have spent so long wrangling with Cass.

When she lifts her head, it's to a knocking sound, so regular she thinks of shoes tied on powerlines, swinging back and forth. Snow showers onto her.

It's the tree. There's a stranger knocking, deadpan, on the bole.

This won't work, she thinks, insanely. She made some preparations for the possibility of the other dead, when Cass showed up. Maritime or Maryland. She wouldn't have enjoyed the intrusion, but it would have gone some way toward excusing her strange luck. But this person can't be from September. They came, Righteousness asserts, from the same direction as the deforestation riggers—from behind and over the wall that borders September's actual forests. They have on an ill-fitting suit, though it's hard to imagine what suit would flatter those proportions. Cropped dark hair, flat eyes. One arm is missing, the sleeve pinned shut. An antenna sticks out through the top of their head.

Walking past Mako's rigger, they clap its hip, hard enough to rock it. That they don't then wipe their hand on their baggy slacks sort of wrongfoots her.

“Hey—”

They put a finger to their lips. Not satisfied with silence, they pat the air in a vigorous shushing gesture. Then they rummage inside their jacket and produce a bag with a nozzle. They don't uncap it, but pump the bag exaggeratedly over Mako's lolling head.

“Is that for sale?” Aria asks.

They extend one foot, and toe the pinecone.

She waits to get angry. But Righteousness is weirdly silent: not like before, in excitement and pride, but with a kind of irritated discipline. It seems to be resisting some hunch; Righteousness hates hunches. It says, We can come back for samples. Your ally takes priority.

“It's yours,” she says, nodding to the stranger.

They squat without further equivocation, like her word is enough. She eases up on Mako's chest, moves aside her jacket, and they pipe goo into the wound. Mech sealant. It puffs up and dries gray. She pushes the walls of the wound together, but they've been cemented, pretty much.

The stranger hands her the half-full bag, and fishes the pinecone out of Mako's fist, careful not to touch the glove. She can pardon Voice's fear, but the way the stranger studies the pinecone is too much for her.

“Is that what this was about? Protecting—that? This thing in you, this thing that's using you?”

Why are you alone, she wants to ask, of Voice and its avatar. Why these impoverished, maimed ghosts—where's the choir, I could talk to you when you were a choir. We sang together.

The stranger doesn't give any sign of having heard. They toss and catch the pinecone, toss it higher. A ray shoots from the scanner at their wrist, nailing the pinecone at the top of its arc. Buoyed on that light, dusted blue, the pinecone idles through one revolution, then turns transparent. The scales pop out, baring the spined tower of the core.

It's the blue, reflected in their eyes—it's the hunched grasshopper posture—it's when they don't smile at her, but nod, rotating their hand 360 degrees, and extending two fingers, like she taught them to for selfies. They get to their feet, pinecone still floating, and the scales start to wink out. The core spins faster and faster, until finally AuDy shakes their head and hits a button on the side of their wrist. The core gets sucked down into the scanner. The ray shuts off.

“You,” she lets Righteousness say, accusingly, to Discovery.

The trees are burning. Not from fire, but from cold; orange, scarlet, and the pines between ash and oak redden too, showing a weak grasp of biology. Goosebumps on her bare arms, her legs, everywhere she's dismantled or retooled this uniform. It's as though all the light, all the things the light touched, got less blue when the eye at AuDy's wrist irised closed. The wind rushing imperiously through the street knocks leaves and snow off every tree, kicks up a swarm of hissing leaves to hide her friend from her.

AuDy, if it's AuDy, must know what's wrong with Mako. Voice endured a lot at Rigor's hands; but AuDy was— She drops the bag like poison and jumps up, hands in loose fists. Afraid, she wants to run to them and ask, What's next? AuDy, wait. What next?

Mako takes a deep, smug breath, which cues her to the fact that he wasn't breathing. The snow slides through his hair. That's sand, not snow. The leaves settle out of chaos, wagging back and forth through the air, and then there are clear leaf shapes in clear gel, like plankton—then just glittery compression artifacts, streaming up and off the table of an open sky. She and Mako are alone on the beach.

 

In real life, Mako has a plastic chest.

She forgot about that. The wound is still ugly, but it's a shallow burn, which might or might not be contracting. There's no reason the plastic should have self-repair capabilities, the Chime couldn't afford that tech and she doesn't for a second believe that Mako, who always kind of hated the hassle of bodies, swapped out that old plating; anyway she recognizes the shiny, crepe-pink tissue, glimpsed on occasion through a plastic top and in the Kingdom Come's crap sickbay. But she might be imagining things—if his chest is healing, it's doing so much slower than in the mesh. The weapon was a dress sword. Not meant for combat.

She's not sure that if she woke him up he wouldn't see the trees. In real life, also, the glove on his hand is a gauntlet, steel and electrodes. The seatbelt's still a seatbelt, though.

He opens his eyes of his own accord. He gives an awful cough. For a moment she thinks something else is damaged, lungs or heart, and he won't be able to talk. He coughs again and says, “Maybe we should get Voice a therapist?”

“Yeah.” She brings her arm, with its inbuilt comm, to her mouth. “Jacqui. Come in.”

“ETA like a minute,” says Jacqui, crackling.

In the sky, a black shape she knows. The Brilliance in flight.

She has a while to think about what an idiot she is while it dives. Mako falls asleep again, snoring flutily. She feels less like she's had a near miss or a scrape, which she got out of through cunning, than like it's been revealed to her that she was wasting time at work. The time, she won't get back; the waste could have gone on much longer. The fundamental mixup might never have shown itself. So humiliation, plus avid relief—she didn't have to be spared, and she was.

Out of that, an inkling of how much she has to do. Some work she thought was underway, or safely accomplished, is only now spreading its silent plain in front of her. The beach is a cove, sheltered by huge cliffs. Their footprints run in aimless lines across the sand. The cliff is gridded with weird square caves, storage space for the servers. Voice, facing out on the sea. Voice still doesn't know who she is. It'll find out soon.

The Brilliance, lilac boosters hiccupy, drops down in the lee of the cliff. It lands in a standing position, arms folded, and from there takes off at a ponderous run. She spreads her unstained, tailless jacket under Mako's head, retrieves her sword, gets up—paces unsteadily forward, but doesn't make it far, before the shadow engulfs her. The Brilliance kneels. It sweeps an arm out in front of it, and the hatch in the broad chest opens; Jacqui leaps to the rigger's wrist and from there to the ground.

“Aria. What happened to _lunch_?”

“Sorry,” says Aria. “Something came up.”

“We could've made it a picnic,” Jacqui says, turning her whole upper body, lacing her fingers behind her back to stretch. Her eyes fall on Mako. “What the fuck?”

“It's okay, it's okay, it's just—you have to help me. Get him into the cockpit. It's okay, I'll walk.”

So they do that, together. Mako seems to get more comfortable, and heavier, the more they have to manhandle him. He drools. Jacqui glances from his chest to the saber, returned, judiciously, to the ornate scabbard-charger at Aria's hip. Aria resists the impulse to overexplain.

When he's safely tucked in, Jacqui takes her by the shoulders. Jacqui gives her a little bone-rattling shake, and stoops to checks her pupils. Overreliance on a Divine can be hard on the brain. It's disheartening, the things she wants from Jacqui, sometimes, when Jacqui's trying to be a good lieutenant.

“How did you get here?” she asks, to distract herself.

“You sent me coordinates,” says Jacqui, frowning. “Or someone did, and they used Automatic Corp encryptions. A little out of date, but...”

“Oh.”

What she finally knows to do is to wait. She waits commandingly, pleadingly, but Jacqui kisses her like it was all Jacqui's idea. Jacqui has no respect for Aria's leadership. Open to compromise, Aria sticks her face in Jacqui's neck. She embraces her, breathes her in, and looks at her through Righteousness—which means a wealth of unusable data, an obsession with vital signs and all outgoing emails. On the infrared spectrum, Jacqui is a torch. Her face glows, and her heart glows, body armored everywhere in the red-gold of her life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand chapter 3 will be up in the next couple of weeks, hopefully, it's a short coda with Koda. Talk--talk to me about FatT on [tumblr](http://gurguliare.tumblr.com/)?


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